After the 1937 flood shattered the town, Portsmouth built a twenty-foot concrete wall to keep the Ohio River out. In 1993 Robert Dafford started painting it, and sixty panels later the wall runs 2,090 feet along Front Street — Native American heritage, river commerce, the Underground Railroad, local sports legends. One panel is a Gothic cathedral window rendered in trompe-l’œil stained glass. On a flood barrier.